Shaping organisational culture is a popular topic. And for good reason, the culture that we exist within influences how we perform and, therefore, the results an organisation can achieve. While most companies and leaders collectively explore what they think their...
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Articles
Read articles on how the latest insights from the world of neuroscience and behavioural science can make a difference to your organisation.
Top 7 Things to Look for in Any Leadership Development Training Session
Over the years, we’ve both led and observed a fair share of leadership development training sessions in the UK and abroad. We’ve spoken to those who train, as well as those who are being trained, gathering feedback and seeing what works and what doesn’t. Based on this...
What Makes a Leadership Development Programme Great?
We’ve all been there. Sitting in a room listening to someone who, at first glance seemed to be just what the company needed. Someone who could talk your people through the ins and outs of how to become a great leader, guiding them through the skills they need and...
How Do You Become Better at Seeing the Future?
There is much discussion these days about whether it is best to live in the moment, whether reminiscing is a good thing, or whether we should always have an eye to the future. However, in reality, we spend much of the day flicking between these different temporal...
Humility: The 5 Hallmarks
Humility, or being humble, is a characteristic which is sometimes perceived to be a barrier to success, a weakness even. It can suggest that you sell yourself short. That you put yourself down when comparing against others. That you don’t think as highly of yourself...
How to Build Executive Presence
The impression of yourself that you display to others is composed of a multitude of micro-behaviours. These are tiny fleeting verbal and nonverbal signals which wield significant power in your social world. And it is these micro-behaviours which can help you build...
Is Being an Expert in Something Always a Good Thing?
Is being an expert in something always a good thing? In his seminal publication “The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money” (1936), the English economist John Maynard Keynes stated the following: ‘‘The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping...
Dominance
Two ears, two eyes, one mouth. The paradox of being one of the “top dogs” Like many of our animal cousins, we humans often find ourselves living and working in social hierarchies. The formation of a natural order where, at least at a group level, some people have more...
The Leaders Engaging Brains
The leaders of today are interested in using the insights from neuroscience to more effectively shape strategy, create a powerful culture and deliver performance that everyone benefits from. On Tuesday I delivered a keynote to around 200 leaders in Wales. Having been...
The Real Deal with Stress in Leadership Training
Stress often gets a bad press and we’re going to look at an example that shows why it really deserves that bad press in this particular set of circumstances. Stress can occur in many different ways and each individual is different in how they create a stress response...
Should Female Leadership Training Be Different
In this article we’re looking at whether female leadership training should be any different to male leadership training. My answer in brief is maybe, or at least, women & men should understand the biological differences in our brain and how this can enable them to...
Positioning Leadership Trainings
Some leaders can feel that they’ve heard it all before. They can feel that they’ve been into lots of leadership trainings and by now they know what they’re doing and they really don’t have anything more to learn. This can be one viewpoint that leaders come from....
Neuroscience Transforming Leadership Trainings
Leadership trainings can be based on guesswork and they can be based purely on what people have observed and people’s experience, but while it is hugely valuable that’s only one side of what’s going on. If we work only with guesswork, like many leadership trainings...
Leadership Training on Multitasking
Multitasking does have a place in modern leadership training and there's an opportunity to go much deeper into it. The reason for this is because if our aim is to create leaders who are efficient and effectively leading people, then we need to look at multitasking...
Leadership Training-Handling Conflict
Conflict is something that quite often leadership trainings can overcomplicate and make out it’s a very complex issue and a difficult issue to try to reduce conflict in different situations. From a neuroscience perspective it’s actually very simple and when we get...
Leadership Training Top Tips
I have three top tips for leadership trainings. The first is to hire leaders, second is to share and embody a vision, mission, purpose and values and the third is to lead by example. Let’s talk about a company that I believe do...
Leadership Training Myths
Leadership Training myths look at the common misunderstandings that end up devaluing leadership trainings. Leadership training myths cost companies dearly. I agree that at sometimes in leadership training an element of...
Leadership Training and the Demonization of Stress
In my experience, a lot of leadership trainings can demonize stress. They can make it out to be this terrible thing that has all these negative impacts on the body and mind, on productivity, efficiency and on effectiveness in getting the results that you want. ...
Why Is Hebian Theory Critical To Leadership Training?
In this article we are going to dive into a purely neuroscience topic that is key for leadership training. We’ll start with why we’re going to learn about it. I believe that leaders need to be in brilliant shape for leading themselves before they lead other people....
Why thinking harder isn’t always more efficient
How often do you find yourself struggling to come up with a genius idea? Perhaps you have a deadline looming and you know you need to go into that meeting with a great idea, something that is going to impress the team. You’ve set aside 60 minutes to nail it – the rest...
Paper Power in Leadership
Leading people often involves evoking emotion in them. We know the power of being in an emotional state to elicit it in others, but have you considered the power of paper in evoking emotion? An emotional state means that a person has certain chemicals flying around...
Trusting Leadership
Most people would agree that leading a team or a company or even a single individual becomes easier if you have their trust. Neuro-chemically people change when they trust or do not trust people. Higher levels of oxytocin are...
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